27
FRANKIE
Darla’s face told me something was wrong even before she opened her glossy pink lips.
She stood in the doorway of Jonathan’s lavish bedroom that I’d been sharing lately, her usually-glossy red hair frizzing from the cold outside, her phone clutched to her chest like a lifeline.
“Frankie…” Her voice wobbled. “Anthony Butera passed away.”
The words hit me like an ice bath.
I didn’t know the man, but he was Jonathan’s father. Devin’s sort of mentor. Alex’s tether to the world that had saved him. The man who, for all his brutality, stitched their whole world together.
“Oh my god,” I whispered, sinking onto the edge of the bed. “Jonathan…”
“And the whole organization is losing its goddamn mind,” Darla added quickly, almost apologetically. “The guys can’t get away. Jonathan’s the head now and…well, there’s stuff happening.Security is already on the way here. They want you to stay in the house. No exceptions.”
My heart hurt for them, for all the complicated love and history they had with Anthony.
But another feeling twisted under that grief. Fear. Not for them, but for me. My future. What I might be carrying.
There’d been no opportunity since the day I’d talked to mom on the phone for me to get away.
To get a pregnancy test without the guys knowing. I hadn’t forgotten the little alert on my phone, or the sinking realization that I hadn’t been taking my birth control as diligently as I should have.
Now there was new chaos. But maybe with the guys buried in mob upheaval…I was afraid this was the only chance I’d get.
“Darla,” I said quietly, my tone serious as the grave.
She blinked. “What is it, Frankie?”
“I need your help. Please. I need to get to a drug store.”
She frowned a little. “Frankie, you heard what I just told you. The guys said?—”
“I might be pregnant,” I said, wincing at the first time I’d said the words out loud.
Silence.
Then Darla let out a tiny squeak and dropped onto the bed beside me. “Are you serious? Oh my god. Oh, Christ, Frankie?—”
“I know.” I squeezed my eyes shut, my stomach in terrible knots for a million different reasons, maybe, or maybe there was something inside there that was tying the knots with its little baby fists, so to speak.
My brain was off the rails, just like my life.
“I need a test,” I said slowly. “I need to know before everything gets worse.”
Darla ran a trembling hand through her red waves. “They’re going to kill me.”
“I won’t let them,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure how I’d manage that.
She looked at me. Really looked. Then nodded, decisive and fierce. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Slipping the security team wasn’t easy, but Darla somehow weaponized her assistant badge, her big innocent eyes, and her knowledge of blind spots around the mansion’s side entrance.
It paid to be Alex’s assistant in more ways than one.
Before I could even fully exhale, we were in her small electric car, zipping down a quiet street toward a strip mall.
